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The Saudi Arabian Revolution: How Can It Succeed?

Mr. Fjærtoft is a senior adviser to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Oslo.

Events in Saudi Arabia since the rise to power of Mohammed bin Salman represent, in effect, a revolution from above that is now beyond the point of return to the old stasis. Whether this abrupt change results in success or failure will have profound effects on the region and the wider world.

A failure of the revolution could easily lead to a failed state, taking Saudi Arabia down the path to destruction that turned so grim in Iraq, Syria, Libya and then Yemen. Since the state is an indispensable oil producer, armed to the teeth and with a potential for extremism seething among segments of the population, the implications for global economic and political stability could easily turn very grave. Success, by contrast, may conceivably turn Saudi Arabia into a modern and pluralistic, albeit still authoritarian, state. With its economic power, such a Saudi Arabia could become a regional leader turning the disintegrating violent societies in its neighborhood onto a new path towards stability and a better life.

The question is, how can the positive scenario be realized? For the Saudi Arabian revolution-from-above to succeed, supportive forces must be stronger than the counterforces. Therefore, the strategic problem is how to build supportive forces. In the following, I will offer my answer to this question.

THEORY: STRATEGIC DISCOURSE

The traditional theoretical divide in analyses of international relations and foreign policy lies between realist and constructionist approaches.1 The theories part over the role of agency, its room for maneuver and its constraints. While realists tend to find the international system an objective equation of power, Kenneth Waltz's concept of structural realism,2 legalistic-moralistic constructionists tend to see the international system as a set of principles or codes to be advanced and, if need be, enforced. The archetypal cases of such constructionists are U.S. President Woodrow Wilson following World War I and President George W. Bush with his post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.

This divide bears on policy choices. Influential realists' normative purpose, such as Waltz's,3 has been to restrain policy to avoid its ineffectual or, in the worst cases, destructive unintended effects, above all, war. (While actual policy may in hindsight appear to vacillate on a continuum between the polar opposites of realism and constructionism, our thinking, and hence our theories, tends towards seeing these concepts as a dichotomy.4)

The apparent U.S. and Western supremacy, the "unipolar world," following the end of the Cold War enabled the constructionist idea to emerge within the United Nations that this unchallenged military power should be harnessed to enforce democracy and the protection of human rights. This led to Kofi Annan's proposal for humanitarian intervention,5 an apparently benign idea that was seized upon by the second president Bush and the so-called neocons. In the words of someone who witnessed at close range the U.S. decisions to intervene, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq: "We felt we could do anything, we had a responsibility to put things right."6

Seemingly bearing out realists' call for restraint is the sequence of failed and obviously self-defeating Western policies in the legalistic-moralistic constructionist mode of thinking following Kofi Annan's call for humanitarian intervention in 1999.7 However, the question remains: What options does foreign policy actually infer from a realist paradigm? This is not necessarily a cautious policy of constraint. If power is an objective force forming the international system, the purpose of policy could be to improve the relative power position by a combination of boosting military as well as economic power and forming alliances at the expense of other interested parties. The historical record of this applied realism shows that it, too, like its opposite, the legalistic-moralistic constructionist mode, is self-defeating if undeterred by countervailing considerations. In essence, Bismarck and his successors in Imperial Germany practiced this type of realism, with tragic consequences in World War I and beyond. This is also essentially the type of realism that guides policies in the Middle East today.

After the disasters produced by the constructionist foreign policy of George W. Bush, his successor, President Barack Obama, was greeted as a new realist, a "chess player," by Henry Kissinger.8 Kissinger has been an arch proponent of realism who rejects what he perceives as the idealistic — in my terms, the constructionist — tradition in U.S. foreign policy (although he finds that realism needs an element of idealism to work).9 On Obama, he was only partly correct. Obama himself, by his own account, embraced the moralistic realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, who, while endorsing the realists' call for restraint, urged as a moral imperative that power be harnessed for normative purposes.10 Thus, President Obama was guided by a theory that fused the restraint of realism with the constructionist ideas of Kofi Annan. However, in actual policy, this fusion also proved self-defeating, at least in his endorsement of the French-Danish-Norwegian initiative for humanitarian intervention in Libya, and the failure to intervene effectively in Syria.

The current conflicts in Libya, as well as over Syria, reveal the bankruptcy of both realist and constructionist theories in their vintage forms. In addition, the fusion of realism and constructionism of Niebuhr and Obama proved self-defeating when applied in actual policy.

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